Lucca

Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the Serchio River, in a fertile plain near the Ligurian Sea. The city has a population of about 89,000, while its province has a population of 383,957. Lucca is known as an Italian "Città d'arte" (City of Art) from its intact Renaissance-era city walls and its very well preserved historic center, where, among other buildings and monuments, are located the Piazza dell'Anfiteatro, which has its origins in the second half of the 1st century A.D., the Guinigi Tower, a 45-metre-tall (150 ft) tower that dates from the 1300s, and the Cathedral of San Martino.

Aerial view of Lucca, 2022

Lucca Cathedral, c. 1901

Quotes

• Lucca l'industriosa.
• Lucca the busy.
  • Classical and Foreign Quotations, 3rd ed. (1904), no. 228

• From off our bridge, he said: "O Malebranche,
    Behold one of the elders of Saint Zita;
    Plunge him beneath, for I return for others
  Unto that town, which is well furnished with them.
    All there are barrators, except Bonturo;
    No into Yes for money there is changed.
  • Dante Alighieri, Inferno, XXI, 37–42 (tr. H. W. Longfellow)
  • This is said ironically of Bonturo de’ Dati. By barterers (barrators) are meant peculators, of every description; all who traffic the interests of the public for their own private advantage.

• This one, methought, as master of the sport,
  Rode forth to chase the gaunt wolf and his whelps
  Unto the mountain, which forbids the sight
  Of Lucca to the Pisan.
  • Dante Alighieri, Inferno, XXXIII, 28–30 (tr. H. F. Cary)
  • Monte Pisano separates Pisa from Lucca.

Bagni di Lucca

• The fireflies, pulsing forth their rapid gleams,
    Are the only light
    That breaks the night;
  A stream, that has the voice of many streams,
    Is the only sound
    All around:
  And we have found our way to the rude stone,
  Where many a twilight we have sat alone,
  Though in this summer-darkness never yet;
  We have had happy, happy moments here,
  We have had thoughts we never can forget,
  Which will go on with us beyond the bier.
  The very lineaments of thy dear face
  I do not see, but yet its influence
  I feel, even as my outward sense perceives
  The freshening presence of the chestnut leaves,
  Whose vaguest forms my eye can only trace,
  By following where the darkness seems most dense.
  What light, what sight, what form, can be to us
  Beautiful as this gloom?
  We have come down, alive and conscious,
  Into a blesséd tomb:
  We have left the world behind us,
  Her vexations cannot find us,
  We are too far away;
  There is something to gainsay
  In the life of every day;
  But in this delicious death
  We let go our mortal breath,
  Naught to feel and hear and see,
  But our heart’s felicity;
  Naught with which to be at war,
  Naught to fret our shame or pride,
  Knowing only that we are,
  Caring not what is beside.
  • Richard Monckton Milnes, "Lines Written at the Baths of Lucca"
  • Poems of Many Years (1838), pp. 46–47

• You are at Lucca baths, you tell me, to stay for the summer;
  Florence was quite too hot; you can’t move further at present.
  Will you not come, do you think, before the summer is over?
  • Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, Canto V